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Dating app Whim lets you go on a date on a whim!

Dating is hard, but online dating can be harder. What with trying to get to know a total stranger, who may or may not look like his profile picture, who may or may not be single, who may or may not be running his multi-million dollar enterprise, and who may or may not be an axe murderer! And in this day and age of instant gratification, everyone wants things to happen NOW; not tomorrow, not the day after, but right NOW.

Here’s where LA’s newest dating app, Whim, comes into play. For those who can be nicknamed lazy bones, and who are too lazy to even put in the basic effort to look for a partner, Whim comes as a godsend.

How does it work?

Whim date set up page

Following a quick sign up through Facebook, Whim immediately matches users for a date for that night based on two facts – when you are free and who you like – as long as the user signs up by 4pm that day. Using a sophisticated algorithm, the platform matches users based on deal-breaker and bonus factors. It then gives out several options for a date, which the potential dater has to narrow down to one. But, for a date to happen, the users must mutually choose each other. Then, Whim will ping the two of you at 6pm with a suggested location of a date later that same evening.

How did it come about?

Whim giving details of a drinks special at a bar

CEO Eve Peters, who has prior experience working with Match.com and OKCupid, created Whim to allow singles to skip past the awkward small talk and go straight from online to offline. “Our solution eliminates the extensive search, targeting, messaging, and planning required by existing dating platforms (e.g., Tinder, Hinge, CMB), replacing that model with a dating-on-demand service that brings you curated, same-day dates with singles you have pre-approved,” said Whim, via The Daily Dot.

What happens to the unmatched singles?Eve Peters and her team, which includes Director of Marketing and Partnerships Katey Nilan and CTO Todd Blose, don’t want the unmatched users to go home along that night. Taking the dating experience a step further, they have collaborated with bars and restaurants around the city to offer drink specials for the group of unmatched singles.

According to the Whim founders, “there are a lot of players in the dating space because it’s a huge problem that needs to be solved. New dating apps crop up every day, but most of them are merely an iteration on the last. Whim is uniquely and truly solving the problem bridging online to offline.”

Although there are users on the dating app, Whim, the founders plan to launch it big in December, to a waiting list of over 1000 people in San Francisco and Los Angeles. As the user base of Whim expands, CEO Eve Peters said she believes that there is no better way to improve than to constantly ask for feedback from users.

I fell in love with storytelling long before I knew what it was. Love well written stories, writing with passion, baking lip-smacking-finger-licking chocolate cakes, engaging movies, and home-cooked food. A true work-in-progress and a believer in the idiom 'all those who wander are not lost'. Twitter: @ChaitraRlg